Don’t Stop Talking to Your Customers

AI will try to convince you that you already know enough.

How to talk to your customers.

How are you discovering what will grow your business?

AI can write your emails, analyze customer feedback in seconds, summarize thousands of support tickets, and tell you what themes emerge. If you need to draft survey questions and predict what customers might want next, AI can do that too.

And because it’s so good at all of this, I’m watching something risky happen in e-commerce. Businesses are using AI as a replacement for human interaction with their customers.

Nobody sets out to do this. You don’t wake up thinking, “Today I’m going to avoid my customers.” But it’s happening anyway. AI gives you the illusion of understanding without the work of human conversation. And that illusion is expensive.

There’s a pattern I see everywhere. When you’re starting a business, you talk to customers constantly because you’re desperate to understand what they want. You need to know if your idea makes sense, if your pricing works, and if anyone will pay for your product or service.

Then you get busy. You hire people, build systems, sales are happening, and the business is growing. Time spent with customers gets deprioritized.